Book Review

Lessons from the past

1415: Henry V’s year of glory

Imagine the following scenario. Despite loud prophecies of doom, an English expeditionary force wins sudden and unexpected victories overseas. God is once again proved to be an Englishman. Buoyed up by success and by the intensity of their alliance with other foreign powers, the English go on to occupy wide territories. However, a combination of financial crisis, weak leadership at home and the religious and nationalist fanaticism of those under English military rule swiftly leads to charges that the English are acting illegally, as tyrants even worse than the regime that they boast of having replaced.

Pride, and a belief that even the bitterest of struggles can be won through sheer grit, combined with an illusory prospect of long-term economic advantages, prolong the timescale for withdrawal to such an extent that disengagement, when it eventually comes, brings in its wake a sovereign debt crisis, a breakdown in public order, regime change and a crisis of identity on the home front, along with the abandonment of future prospects of restoring alliances with former friends abroad, and a humiliation so great that even 50 years later the English are still struggling to make any real impact upon international affairs.

For those alive to past ironies, the story of the Anglo-French wars of the fifteenth century casts a particularly intriguing shadow across more recent military engagements. From Henry V’s victory at Agincourt in 1415, through to the ignominious collapse at Castillon in 1453 when the English cavalry charged head-on into a French gun battery, this is a story of hubris, nemesis and catharsis.

It is splendidly told in each of the three books under review. Ian Mortimer’s is certainly the most optimistic: a day-by-day account of the sunnier uplands of Henry V’s year of victories, ranging across the spectrum of the life of the court, the army and the English Church. Mortimer’s special talent lies in the communication to a general audience of the sheer oddity and excitement of past events. A much-told tale that in less talented hands might become stale or repetitive is here illuminated by a context that supplies its own bizarre ori­ginality. Having defeated the French in battle, Henry V had still to win a war. Previous English victories, most notably at Crécy in 1346 (a venture whose circumstances Henry V deliberately sought to reproduce in 1415), had merely added to the stock of English glory, with no long-term strategic advantage to the victors. In 1417, two years after Agincourt, Henry led the first real attempt at what was intended to be a permanent English occupation of Normandy and northern France. The events of 1066 were to be reversed. English armies would conquer and police a cross-Channel empire ruled from Westminster.

At first this campaign, surveyed in Juliet Barker’s book, enjoyed surprising and almost immediate success. Normandy fell within three years, at least in part as a result of revulsion against the “terrorist” techniques of the French and the involvement of the French dauphin in an act of political assassination. Henry V concluded a treaty with the mad King Charles VI of France that led to an English occupation of Paris and the prospect that a son, born of Henry’s marriage to Philip’s daughter, would sit upon both English and French thrones. But, as so often with the most ambitious imperialist plans, defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory. Henry V died only a year after negotiating his treaty. His son, Henry VI, a mere baby at his father’s death, grew up to be an ultimately disastrous ruler, dominated for the first 20 years of his reign by Henry V’s surviving brothers, the Dukes of Bedford and Gloucester.

Barker has no difficulty in assigning blame for what happened thereafter: Bedford is her hero, Gloucester and the infighting that he fomented at court the direct cause by which England’s Norman empire was starved of finance and leadership. When the English alliance with Burgundy collapsed, only a few days after Bedford’s death, the fate of England’s empire was sealed. Summarising a wealth of detail in clear and vivid language, Barker narrates one of the least heroic epochs in English history.

Both Mortimer and Barker are professionally trained historians writing from outside the academic world for a general public keen to be both enlightened and entertained. Professor Larissa Taylor’s account of the life of Joan of Arc, by contrast, is the only one of these books written by a tenured academic. The story here is told with no lack of excitement, but with rather fewer new insights than both Mortimer and Barker supply. Joan’s charisma, Taylor shows, was not entirely manu­factured. Although carefully prompted in how to fight and proclaim her mission for the recognition of the dauphin, Charles VII, as King of France, in place of the English schoolboy, Henry VI, Joan possessed a considerable measure of native cunning – some might suggest divine inspiration.

Joan strutted for only a year upon the stage of Anglo-French warfare before being captured by the Burgundians and handed over for trial by the English. Yet her defence of the city of Orléans in 1429 had already proved the English army’s Stalingrad: the tipping point after which English fortunes slid to defeat. Her claims to be a prophetic mouthpiece for the saints have won fewer admirers in England than in France; the story of the pitfalls laid for her by her accusers, like later accounts of English torture and duplicity, has been airbrushed from English national myth.

The English, being a people whose self-perception is founded upon ideas of decency and fair play, are generally blind to their own capacity for indecency or even wickedness. Yet English self-perceptions are far from being universally received. In France, Joan remains a potent symbol in the politics of Church and State. Taylor supplies a clear account of Joan’s life, trial and execution, from which the Duke of Bedford emerges in a far less heroic light than from Juliet Barker’s telling. Taylor nonetheless leaves the question of Joan’s posthumous legacy to others – in some ways a ducking of responsibilities, since so much of Joan’s importance resides in her fate after her death. All three of these books can be highly recommended, not least to those inclined to learn from the lessons of the past.

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